Before Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter arrived at a backyard picnic-styled health care rally Thursday night, she stopped at a downtown hotel where her staff is staying and found herself face-to-face with those who say she’s promoting a government takeover of the nation’s health care system.

“Find those tea-baggers who don’t like the idea of this and talk to them. You won’t get all of them, but I think when they realize we’re still going to be an employer-based insurance system in this country, and that it is a choice — one choice among many choices — it takes away that sense of fear, that sense that they’re losing control over their lives. They’re not. What’s happening is we’re giving some people who haven’t had any choice, a choice.”

…Organizers— which included Organizing for America, a grassroots arms of the Democratic National Committee, the SEIU, Health Care for America Now! and New Hampshire for Health Care — said the majority of people at the home were supportive of reform. But even supporters said complete change will take time.

Congressman Paul Hodes, D-Concord, said there’s reason to be hopeful. “We are facing up to what the opponents of change — to what the flat-earth society — is trying to put over on us, which is keep the status quo and what they care about is health scare, not health care. But we know that that tide is not going to wash up on our shores.”

Speaking to reporters, Shea-Porter didn’t say why her staff was at the hotel, but she’s holding a public town-hall meeting in the city Saturday. She said the “tea-baggers” were quizzing her on the logistics.

In four short years Carol Shea-Porter has evolved from a rabble-rousing, town hall disrupting anti-war activist who once had to be forcibly removed from a President George Bush event in Portsmouth to a Member of Congress who instructed armed security guards to remove a frustrated voter from her own town hall event in Manchester on Saturday.

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